Port Pinger

Port Pinger is a small-sized and portable command-line tool you can use to find the opened and closed ports of any host on your local network. This task is carried out by specifying the computer's IP address and port number to check.

There is no installation file available. Instead, the program is packed into a single .exe that you can copy anyplace on the hard disk or removable storage device to effortlessly deploy it on any PC. Just keep in mind that it requires .NET Framework to work properly. However, it doesn't create new files or registry entries.

Although many casual users have trouble handling console interfaces, this utility has a single line of code with only two parameters. The syntax is pping [ip] [port].

It works only by specifying the IP address of the remote PC, since it doesn't recognize host names. If you want to verify ports on your own computer, it's necessary to write 127.0.0.1 as the IP address.

The task doesn't take long, at the end of which you can find out the status: open or closed. Port Pinger doesn't automatically exit after this, so you can rescan a different port without having to relaunch it.

Unsurprisingly from such a feather-light tool, it didn't hamper the computer's performance in our evaluation. It executed scanning operations fast and remained stable throughout its runtime. Although it hasn't received updates recently, it didn't have compatibility issues with newer Windows versions in our tests.

On the other hand, Port Pinger is only capable of checking ports one by one, since it doesn't implement options for scanning an entire range to put together a list of all ports and their status. Nevertheless, it proves to be a straightforward port checker.